I picked up Snuggs and cuddled him in my arm. I wiped his feet with a paper towel.
“Did you hear me, Dave?” Clete said.
“Yeah, I did. I’ve got no answers. But if Smiley caps somebody else — maybe Sean McClain — you’ll never forgive yourself.”
He looked like I’d punched him in the stomach.
Helen was furious when I told her of Clete’s contact with Smiley.
“What was he supposed to do?” I said. “Run outside and catch one in the face?”
“Clete didn’t call it in.”
“What good would that have done? Smiley has never been in custody anywhere. Plus, I think the department discounts anything Clete says.”
Her fists were knotted on her desk pad. I thought I had her.
“Hugo Tillinger died at seven-thirty this morning,” she said.
I felt my heart drop.
“Iberia General called a half hour ago,” she said. “You know what this means for Sean McClain?”
I went back to my office and dipped into my file cabinet and laid out all my notes and manila folders and photographs and medical reports and printouts from the state police and FBI on the series of homicides that had begun with the death of Lucinda Arceneaux. I was convinced the killer was insane, obsessed, imperious, and wired in to a frame of reference no one else would comprehend. But others were involved, if only tangentially. Corrupt or sadistic personnel in the department were players, and members of the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Mob, and film people who weren’t bothered by blood money, and Russian or Saudi wheeler-dealers, and possibly a bank that laundered money in Malta.
Maybe such an aggregate of causality seems improbable for a series of crimes in a disappearing wetlands area on the southern rim of our country. But the truth always lies in the microcosm. Wars of enormous importance and consequence are usually fought in places no one cares about. The faces of the players change, but not the issue. You go to the center of the vortex and soon discover you have already been there. It’s a matter of seeing the details.
In this instance the key had to be in the tarot. Lucinda Arceneaux was the crucified Christ. The walking cane through the heart of Joe Molinari represented the Suit of Wands; the net in which he was suspended suggested the Hanged Man. The sequined star pasted on the forehead of Hilary Bienville was the Suit of Pentacles. The chalice the killer had fitted into the dead hand of Bella Delahoussaye was symbolic of the Suit of Cups.
What was not in the photographs?
Answer: The Suit of Swords. But what if there were bodies out there we hadn’t found? I couldn’t think my way through the material I was looking at.
The term “conspiracy theory” has become a term of contempt, I suspect because many of the electorate cannot accept that sometimes more evil exists at the top of society than at the bottom. One by one I looked at the photographs of the victims. It was a somber moment. That the photographs had been taken at all seemed heartless, an invasion of the victim’s suffering and despair and vulnerability. They were the kind of photographs that defense lawyers never want a jury to see. The image that hurt me most was of Bella Delahoussaye.
I wanted to believe Bella spat in her tormentor’s face. I wanted to believe she humiliated him for the worm he was. But I knew Bella was better than that. She probably treated him with pity, which drove him into an even greater rage.
I closed her folder and propped my elbows on my desk blotter and lowered my forehead on my hands and asked my Higher Power to go back in time and be with Bella in her last minutes. Then I felt a level of anger that was so great and violent and dangerous in its intensity that it caused half of my face to go dead. I hoped no one passing in the hallway looked through my window.
Chapter Thirty-One
Saturday morning was perfect. The sunrise was striped with pink and purple clouds, the live oaks a deep green after the rain, the bayou high above the banks, the lily pads and elephant ears rolling with the current. It was a study in the mercurial nature of light and shadow and the way they form and re-create the external world second by second with no more guidance than a puff of wind. I believed it was akin to the obsession of Desmond Cormier with John Ford’s films and the Manichean dualism of light and darkness. I believed I was looking into the center of the Great Mystery right there in my backyard.
But my lighthearted mood did not last long. Later, as I was raking leaves in the front yard, I saw Antoine Butterworth’s Subaru coming up East Main, past the library and city hall and the grotto devoted to Jesus’ mother. I turned my back to the street, gathering up an armload of leaves to stuff in a barrel, hoping that Butterworth would drive on by.
I heard his wheels turn into my driveway and bounce with the dip. The top of his Subaru was down. He cut his engine and got out, dressed in pleated white slacks and a golf shirt and sandals, with a pale blue silk bandana tied around his neck, the way a rogue Errol Flynn might wear it. He held a manila envelope in one hand.
“Normally, I’d take this to your supervisor,” he said. “But since she’s not in on Saturday, I thought you wouldn’t mind my dropping by. What a snug little place you have here.”
“What is it, Butterworth?”
“Actually, I was made privy to this material by Lou Wexler, busy little shit that he is.”
“You’re not a Brit. Why do you try to talk like one?”
“You don’t think Lou is a little shit? Oh, I forgot, he’s dating your daughter.”
“She’s not dating him, bub.”
“That would be news to Lou.”
I began raking again, the tines biting into the dirt.
“He did some checking on your partner, Detective Ribbons,” Butterworth said. “Want to hear the results?”
My hands were tingling. I raked harder, a bead of sweat running down my nose.
“Not curious at all?” he said. “My, my.”
I stopped, the rake propped in my hand. “Say it.”
“Bailey was a bad little girl and was playing with matches.”
I held my eyes on his. How could either Wexler or Butterworth know about the arson deaths of the three rapists on an Indian reservation in western Montana? According to Bailey, she had never told anyone what she had done except me and the Indian woman with whom she lived.
“Cat got your tongue?” he said.
“I’m off the clock now,” I said. “I’m also on my own property.”
“Meaning?”
“You might be having your next meal through a glass straw.”
“I’ll leave this private investigator’s report for you to read at your leisure. Ta-ta.”
“Why would Wexler be interested in the background of Detective Ribbons?”
“It’s not Wexler. Outside of posing in front of a mirror, his chief interest in life is lessons in classical Latin, if you get my drift. Put it this way — he loves to shoot films in Thailand. Desmond told him to check out your partner.”
“Why her?”
“You and she are hurting Des financially. That said, by extension, you’re hurting Lou and me.”
“Get off my property.”
“Not interested in the tykes who got burned in a schoolhouse fire?”
Then I realized he wasn’t talking about the death of the rapists. My stomach felt sick, my face sweaty and cold in the wind. “Where’d this happen?”
“In Holy Cross, in the Lower Ninth Ward. None of the children died. But a certain little girl was in a lot of trouble for a while. The welfare worker said she was ‘disturbed.’ Broken home, alcoholic mother, poverty, all that Little Match Girl routine, no pun intended.”
I went back to raking, my hands dry and stiff on the rake handle, my eyes out of focus.